Re: [idn] An open letter to the IDN WG (long)

[Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine <brunner@nic-naa.net>]

Brian,

I arrived at a different impression, but after speaking with XiaoDong Lee,
Wang Yan Feng, Sun Guo Nian, and Deng Xiang for a little over two hours 
Monday afternoon, and an additional hour (with Paul Hoffman) on Tuesday
afternoon.

My impression was that problem presented by "the Simplified vs. Traditional
Chinese script problem" was secondary, and resolvable (pun intended) by
both policy mechanisms (at registRIEs and/or at registRARs, and which is
incidently a use-case to discuss in the PROVREG WG motivating instances
of communication initiated by registRIEs and not by registANTs or registRARs),
and operationally (a form of "A record punning"). I expect Paul can offer his
recollection of this particular issue as well, as this was the very subject
we disussed Tuesday prior to the PROVREG WG meeting.

The primary motivational concern I came away from meeting with the CNNICers
was use of _any_ code points supporting some form of Chinese characters, and
that disambiguation (your "struggling with how to" comment) was a matter of
convenience, not necessity.

To put this in the specific context offered by Patrik, I've the impression
that CNNIC wants primarily to (a) "use non-ascii characters in the identifiers
we store in DNS", and only secondarily a goal only approximated by the sense
of Patrik's (b) "to store words in DNS."

Just to be sure we understand Mssrs Lee, Geng, Nian, and Xiang work, could
you explain why they presented a (GBK|Big5)/utf-8 implementation experience
report, if their interest was something other than encoding issues?

Cheers,
Eric